CHAPTER VIII

RICHARD PUTS HIS HAND TO A PLOUGH FROM WHICH THERE IS NO
TURNING BACK

“DEAREST mother, you look most deplorably tired.”

Richard sat before the large study table, piled up with letters, papers,
county histories, racing calendars, in the Gun‐Room, amid a haze of cigar
smoke.—“I don’t wonder,” he went on, “we’ve had a regular field‐day, haven’t
we? And I’m afraid Lord Fallowfeild bored you atrociously at luncheon. He
does talk most admired foolishness half his time, poor old boy. All the same
Ludovic shouldn’t show him up as he does. It’s not good form. I’m afraid
Ludovic’s getting rather spoilt by London. He’s growing altogether too
finicking and elaborate. It’s a pity. Lady Louisa Barking is a rather
exterminating person. Her conversation is magnificently deficient in humour.
It is to be hoped Barking is not troubled by lively perceptions, or he must
suffer at times. Lady Constance is a pretty little girl, don’t you think so?
Not oppressed with brains, I daresay, but a good little sort.”

“Oh yes!—well enough—liked her in passing, as one likes the wild roses in the
hedge. But you look regularly played out, mother, and I don’t like that in
the least.”

Richard twisted the revolving‐chair half round, and held out his arms in
invitation. As his mother leaned over him, he stretched upward and clasped
his hands lightly about her neck.—“Poor dear,” he said coaxingly, “worn to
fiddle‐strings with all this wild dissipation! I declare it’s quite
pathetic.”—He let her go, shrugging his shoulders with a sigh and a half
laugh. “Well, the dissipation will soon enough be over now, and we shall
resume the even tenor of our way, I suppose. You’ll be glad of that,
mother?”

The caress had been grateful to Katherine, the cool cheek
page: 230 dear to her lips, the clasp of the strong arms
reassuring. Yet, in her present state of depression, she was inclined to
distrust even that which consoled, and there seemed a lack in the fervour of
this embrace. Was it not just a trifle perfunctory, as of one who pays toll,
rather than of one who claims a privilege?

“You’ll be glad too, my dearest, I trust?” she said, craving further
encouragement.

Richard twisted the chair back into place again, leaned forward to note the
hour of the clock set in the centre of the gold and enamel inkstand.

“Oh! I’m not prophetic. I don’t pretend to go before the event and register
my sensations until both they and I have fairly arrived. It’s awfully bad
economy to get ahead of yourself and live in the day after to‐morrow.
To‐day’s enough—more than enough for you, I’m afraid, when you’ve had a
large contingent of the Whitney people to luncheon. Do go and rest, mother.
Uncle William is disposed of. I’ve started him out for a tramp with Julius,
so you need not have him on your mind.”

But neither in Richard’s words nor in his manner did Lady Calmady find the
fulness of assurance she craved.

“Thanks, dearest,” she said. “That is very thoughtful of you. I will see
Helen and find out”—

“Oh! don’t trouble about her either,” Richard put in. Again he studied the
jewel‐rimmed dial of the little clock. “I found she wanted to go to Newlands
to bid Mrs. Cathcart good‐bye. It seems Miss St. Quentin is back there for a
day or two. So I promised to drive her over as soon as we were quit of the
Fallowfeild party.”

“It is late for so long a drive.”

Richard looked up quickly and his face wore that expression of challenge once
again.

“I know it is—and so I am afraid we ought to start at once. I expect the
carriage round immediately.”—Then repenting:—“You’ll take care of yourself,
won’t you, mother, and rest?”

“Oh yes! I will take care of myself,” Katherine said. “Indeed, I appear to be
the only person I have left to take care of, thanks to your forethought. All
good go with you, Dick.”

It followed—perhaps unreasonably enough—that Richard, some five minutes
later, drove round the angle of the house and drew the mail‐phaeton up at
the foot of the
page: 231 grey, griffin‐guarded
flight of steps—whereon Madame de Vallorbes, wrapped in furs, the cavalier
hat and its trailing plumes shadowing the upper part of her face and her
bright hair, awaited his coming—in a rather defiant humour. His cousin was
troubled, worried, and she met with scant sympathy. This aroused all his
chivalry. Whatever she wished for, that he could give her, she should very
certainly have. Of after consequences to himself he was contemptuous. The
course of action which had shown as wisdom a couple of hours ago, showed now
as selfishness and pusillanimity. If she wanted him, he was there joyfully
to do her bidding, at whatever cost to himself in subsequent unrest of mind
seemed but a small thing. If heartache and insidious provocations of the
flesh came later, let them come. He was strong enough to bear the one and
crush out the other, he hoped. It would give him something to do—he told
himself, a little bitterly—and he had been idle of late!

And so it came about that Richard Calmady held out his hand, to help his
cousin into her place at his side, with more of meaning and welcome in the
gesture than he was quite aware. He forgot the humiliation of the broad
strap about his waist, of the high, ingeniously contrived driving‐iron
against which his feet rested, steadying him upon the sharply sloping seat.
These were details, objectionable ones it was true, but, to‐day, of very
secondary importance. In the main he was master of the situation. For once
it was his to render, rather than receive, assistance. Helen was under his
care, in a measure dependent on him, and this gratified his young, masculine
pride, doomed too often to suffer sharp mortification. A fierce pleasure
possessed him. It was fine to bear her thus away, behind the fast trotting
horses, through the pensive, autumn brightness. Boyish self‐consciousness
and self‐distrust died down in Richard, and the man’s self‐reliance,
instinct of possession and of authority, grew in him. His tone was that of
command, for all its solicitude, as he said:—

“Look here, are you sure you’ve got enough on? Don’t go and catch cold, under
the impression that there’s any meaning in this sunshine. It is sure to be
chilly driving home, and it’s easy to take more wraps.”

Helen shook her head, unsmiling, serious.

“I could face polar snows.”

Richard let the horses spring forward, while little pebbles rattled against
the body of the phaeton, and the groom, running a few steps, swung himself
up on to the back seat, immediately
page: 232
becoming immoveable as a wooden image, with rigidly folded arms.

“Oh! the cold won’t quite amount to that,” Richard said. “But I observe women
rarely reckon with the probabilities of the return journey.”

“The return journey is invariably too hot, or too cold, too soon, or too
late—for a woman. So it is better not to remember its existence until you
are compelled to do so. For myself, I confess to the strongest prejudice
against the return journey.”

Madame de Vallorbes’ speech was calm and measured, yet there was a conviction
in it suggestive of considerable emotion. She sat well back in the carriage,
her head turned slightly to the left, so that Richard, looking down at her,
saw little but the pure, firm line of her jaw, the contour of her cheek, and
her ear—small, lovely, the soft hair curling away from above and behind it
in the most enticing fashion. Physical perfection, of necessity, provoked in
him a peculiar envy and delight. And nature appeared to have taken ingenious
pleasure, not only in conferring an unusual degree of beauty upon his
companion, but in finishing each detail of her person with unstinted grace.
For a while the young man lost himself in contemplation of that charming ear
and partially averted face. Then resolutely he bestowed his attention upon
the horses again, finding such contemplation slightly enervating to his
moral sense.

“Yes, return journeys are generally rather a nuisance, I suppose,” he said,
“though my experience of that particular form of nuisance is limited. I have
not been outward‐bound often enough to know much of the regret of being
homeward‐bound. And yet, I own, I should not much mind driving on and on
everlastingly on a dreamy afternoon like this, and—and as I find myself just
now—driving on and seeking some El Dorado—of the spirit, I mean, not of the
pocket—seeking the Fortunate Isles that lie beyond the sunset. For it would
be not a little fascinating to give one’s accustomed self, and all that goes
to make up one’s accepted identity, the slip—to drive clean out of one’s old
circumstances and find new heavens, a new earth, and a new personality
elsewhere. What do you say, Helen, shall we try it?”

But Helen sat immobile, her face averted, listening intently, revolving many
things in her mind, meditating how and when most advantageously to
speak.

“It would be such an amiable and graceful experiment to try on my own people,
too, wouldn’t it ?” the young man con‐
page: 233
tinued, with a sudden change of tone. “And I am so eminently fitted to lose
myself in a crowd without fear of recognition, just the person for a case of
mistaken identity.”

“Do not say such things, Richard, please. They distress me,” Madame de
Vallorbes put in quickly. “And, believe me, I have no quarrel with the
return journey in this case. At Brockhurst I could fancy myself to have
found the Fortunate Isles of which you spoke just now. I have been very
happy there—too happy, perhaps, and therefore, to‐day, the whip has come
down across my back, just to remind me.”

Madame de Vallorbes turned her head and looked at him with the strangest
expression.

“My metaphor was not out of place. Do you imagine horses are the only animals
a man drives, mon beau cousin? Some men
drive the woman who belongs to them, and that not with the lightest bit, I
promise you. Nor do they forget to tie blood‐knots in the whip‐lash when it
suits them to do so.”

“What do you mean?” he asked abruptly.

“Merely that the letters, which so stupidly endangered my self‐control at
luncheon, contained examples of that kind of driving.”

“How—how damnable,” the young man said between his teeth.

The red and purple trunks of the great fir trees reeled away to right and
left as the carriage swept forward down the long avenue. To Richard’s seeing
they reeled away in disgust, even as did his thought from the images which
his companion’s words suggested. While, to her seeing, they reeled, smitten
by the eternal laughter, the echoes of which it stimulated her to hear.—“The
drama develops,” she said to herself, half triumphant, half abashed. “And
yet I am telling the truth, it is all so—I hardly even doctor it.”—For she
had been angered, genuinely and miserably angered, and had found that odious
to the point of letting feeling override diplomacy. There was subtle
pleasure in now turning her very lapse of self‐control to her own advantage.
And then, this young man’s heart was the finest, purest‐toned instrument
upon which she had ever had the chance to play as yet. She was ravished by
the quality and range of the music it gave forth. Madame de Vallorbes
pressed her hands together within the warm comfort of her sable muff,
averted her face again, lest it should betray the eager excitement that
gained on her, and continued:—

page: 234

“Yes, whip and rein and bit are hardly pretty in that connection, are they?
If you would willingly give your identity the slip at times, dear cousin, I
have considerably deeper cause to wish to part company with mine! You, in
any case, are morally and materially free. A whole class of particularly
irritating and base cares can never approach you. And it was in connection
with just such cares that I spoke of the hatefulness of return
journeys.”

“That is what I ask myself,” she said, in the same quiet, even voice. “I have
not yet arrived at a decision, and so I asked you to bring me out, Dickie,
this afternoon.”—She looked up at him, smiling, lovely and with a certain
wistful dignity, wholly coercive. “Can you understand that the orderly
serenity of your splendid house became a little oppressive? It offered too
glaring a contrast to my own state of mind and outlook. I fancied my brain
would be clearer, my conclusions more just, here out of doors, face to face
with this half‐savage nature.”

“Ah, I know all that,” Richard said. Had not the blankness of the fog brought
him help this very morning?—“I know it, but I wish you did not know it
too.”

“I know many things better not known,” Helen replied. Her conscience pricked
her. She thanked her stars confession had ceased with enlargement from the
convent‐school, and was a thing of the past.—“You see, I want to decide just
how long I dare stay—if you will keep me?”

“We will keep you,” Richard said.

“You are very charming to me, Dick,” she exclaimed impulsively, sincerely,
again slightly abashed. “How long can I dare stay, I wonder, without making
matters worse in the end, both for my father and for myself? I am young,
after all, and I suppose I am tough. The cuticle of the soul—if souls can
have a cuticle—like that of the body, thickens under repeated blows. But my
father is no longer young. He is terribly sensitive where I am concerned.
And he is inevitably drawn into the whirlpool of my wretched affairs sooner
or later. On his account I should be glad to defer the return journey as
long”—

“But—but—I don’t understand,” Richard broke out, pity and deep concern for
her, a blind fury against a person, or persons
page: 235 unknown, getting the better of him. “Who on earth
has the power to plague you and make you miserable, or your father
either?”

The young man’s face was white, his eyes, full of pain, full of a great love,
burning down on her. As once long ago, Helen de Vallorbes could have danced
and clapped her hands in naughty glee. For her hunting had prospered above
her fondest hopes. She had much ado to stifle the laughter which bubbled up
in her pretty throat. She was in the humour to pelt peacocks royally, had
such pastime been possible. As it was, she closed her eyes for a little
minute and waited, biting the inside of her lip. At last, she said slowly,
almost solemnly:—

“Don’t you know that for certain mistakes, and those usually the most
generous, there is no redress?”

“What do you mean?” he demanded.

“Mean?—the veriest commonplace in my own case,” she answered. “Merely an
unhappy marriage. There are thousands such.”

They had left the shadow of the fir woods now. The carriage crossed the
white‐railed culvert—bridging the little stream that taking its rise amid
the pink and emerald mosses of the peat‐bog, meanders down the valley—and
entered the oak plantation just inside the park gate. Russet leaves in
rustling, hurrying companies, fled up and away from the rapidly turning
wheels and quick horse hoofs. The sunshine was wan and chill as the smile on
a dead face. Lines of pale, lilac cloud—shaped like those flights of cranes
which decorate the oriental cabinets of the Long Gallery—crossed the western
sky above the bare, balsam poplars, the cluster of ancient, half‐timbered
cottages at the entrance to Sandyfield church lane, and the rise of the
grey‐brown fallow beyond, where sheep moved, bleating plaintively, within a
wattled fold.

The scene, altogether familiar though it was, impressed itself on Richard’s
mind just now, as one of paralysing melancholy. God help us, what a
stricken, famished world it is! Will you not always find sorrow and
misfortune seated at the root of things if, disregarding overlaying
prettiness of summer days, of green leaf and gay blossom, you dare draw
near, dig deep, look close? And can nothing, no one, escape the blighting
touch of that canker stationed at the very foundations of being? Certainly
it would seem not—Richard reasoned—listening to the words of the radiant
woman beside him, ordained, in right of her talent and puissant grace, to be
a queen and idol of men. For sadder than the thin sunshine, bare trees and
complaint of the hungry
page: 236 sheep, was that
assured declaration that loveless and unlovely marriages—of which her own
was one—exist by the thousand, are, indeed, the veriest commonplace!

These reflections held Richard, since he had been thinker and poet—in his
degree—since childhood; lover only during the brief space of these last ten
surprising days. Thus the general application claimed his attention first.
But hard on the heels of this followed the personal application. For, as is
the way of all true lovers, the universality of the law under which it takes
its rise mitigates, by most uncommonly little, either the joy or sorrow of
the particular case. Poignant regret that she suffered, strong admiration
that she bore suffering so adherent with such lightness of demeanour—then,
more dangerous than these, a sense of added unlooked‐for nearness to her,
and a resultant calling not merely of the spirit of youth in him to that
same spirit resident in her, but the deeper, more compelling, more sonorous
call from the knowledge of tragedy in him to that same terrible knowledge
now first made evident in her.—And here Richard’s heart—in spite of pity, in
spite of tenderness which would have borne a hundred miseries to save her
five minutes’ discomfort—sang Te Deum, and that lustily enough!
For by this revelation of the infelicity of her state, his whole relation
to, and duty towards her changed and took on a greater freedom. To pour
forth worship and offers of service at the feet of a happy woman is at once
an impertinence to her and a shame to yourself. But to pour forth such
worship, such offers of service, at the feet of an unhappy woman—age‐old
sophistry, so often ruling the speech and actions of men to their fatal
undoing!—this is praiseworthy and legitimate, a matter not of privilege
merely, but of obligation to whoso would claim to be truly chivalrous.

The perception of his larger liberty, and the consequences following thereon,
kept Richard silent till Sandyfield rectory, the squat‐towered, Georgian
church and the black‐headed, yew trees in the close‐packed churchyard
adjoining, the neighbouring farm and its goodly show of golden‐grey
wheat‐ricks were left behind, and the carriage entered on the flat,
furze‐dotted expanse of Sandyfield common. Flocks of geese, arising from
damp repose upon the ragged, autumn turf, hissed forth futile declarations
of war. A gipsy caravan painted in staring colours, and hung all over with
heath‐brooms and basket‐chairs, caused the horses to swerve. Parties of
home‐going school‐children backed on to the loose gravel at the roadside,
bobbing curtsies or pulling forelocks, staring at the young man and his
companion, curious and half afraid. For, in the youthful, bucolic mind, a
mystery surrounded
page: 237 Richard Calmady and his
goings and comings, causing him to rank with crowned heads, ghosts, the Book
of Daniel, funerals, the Northern Lights, and kindred matters of dread
fascination. So wondering eyes pursued him down the road.

And wondering eyes, as the minutes passed, glanced up at him from beneath the
sweeping plumes and becoming shadow of the cavalier’s hat. For his prolonged
silence rendered Madame de Vallorbes anxious. Had she spoken unadvisedly
with her tongue? Had her words sounded crude and of questionable delicacy?
Given his antecedents and upbringing, Richard was bound to hold the marriage
tie in rather superstitious reverence, and was likely to entertain slightly
superannuated views regarding the obligation of reticence in the discussion
of family matters. She feared she had reckoned insufficiently with all this,
in her eagerness, forgetting subtle diplomacies. Her approach had lacked
tact and finesse. In dealing with an
adversary of coarser fibre her attack would have succeeded to admiration.
But this man was refined and sensitive to a fault, easily disgusted,
narrowly critical in questions of taste.

Therefore she glanced up at him again, trying to divine his thought, her own
mind in a tumult of opposing purposes and desires. And just as the
contemplation of her beauty had so deeply stirred him earlier this same
afternoon, so did the contemplation of his beauty now stir her. It satisfied
her artistic sense. Save that the nose was straighter and shorter, the young
man reminded her notably of a certain antique, terra‐cotta head of the young
Alexander which she had once seen in a museum at Munich, and which had left
an ineffaceable impression upon her memory. But, the face of the young
Alexander beside her was of nobler moral quality than that other—undebauched
by feasts and licentious pleasures as yet, masculine yet temperate, the
sanctuary of generous ambitions. Merciless it might be, she fancied, but
never base, never weak. Thus was her artistic sense satisfied, morally as
well as physically. Her social sense was satisfied also. For the young man’s
high‐breeding could not be called in question. He held himself remarkably
well. She approved the cut of his clothes moreover, his sure and easy
handling of the spirited horses.

And then her eyes, following down the lines of the fur rug, received renewed
assurance of the fact of his deformity—hidden as far as might be, with
decent pride, yet there, permanent and unalterable. This worked upon her
strongly. For, to her peculiar temperament, the indissoluble union in one
body of elements so noble and so monstrous, of youthful rigour and
page: 238 abject helplessness, the grotesque in
short, supplied the last word of sensuous and dramatic attraction. As last
evening, in the Long Gallery, so now, she hugged herself, at once frightened
and fascinated, wrought upon by excitement as in the presence of something
akin to the supernatural, and altogether beyond the confines of ordinary
experience.

And to think that she had come so near holding this inimitable creature in
her hand, and by overhaste, or clumsiness of statement should lose it!
Madame de Vallorbes was wild with irritation, racked her brain for means to
recover her—as she feared—forfeited position. It would be maddening did her
mighty hunting prove but a barren pastime in the end. And thereupon the
little scar on her temple, deftly concealed under the soft, bright hair,
began to smart and throb. Ah! well, the hunting should not prove quite
barren anyhow, of that she was determined, for, failing her late gay
purpose, that small matter of long‐deferred revenge still remained in
reserve. If she could not gratify one passion, she would gratify quite
another. For in this fair lady’s mind it was—perhaps unfortunately—but one
step from the Eden bowers of love to the waste places of vindictive
hate.—“Yet I would rather be good to him, far rather,” she said to herself,
with a movement of quite pathetic sincerity.

But here, just at the entrance to the village street, an altogether
unconscious deus ex machinâ—destined at
once to relieve Helen of further anxiety, and commit poor Dickie to a course
of action affecting the whole of his subsequent career—presented itself in
the shape of a white‐tented miller’s waggon, which, with somnolent jingle of
harness bells and most admired deliberation, moved down the centre of the
road. A yellow‐washed garden‐wall on one side, the brook on the other, there
was not room for the phaeton to pass.

“Whistle,” Richard commanded over his shoulder. And the wooden image, thereby
galvanised into immediate activity, whistled shrilly, but without result as
far as the waggon was concerned.

“The fellow’s asleep. Go and tell him to pull out of the way.”

Then, while the groom ran neatly forward in twinkling, white breeches and
flesh‐coloured tops, Richard, bending towards her, as far as that
controlling strap about his waist permitted, shifted the reins into his
right hand and laid his left upon Madame de Vallorbes’ sable muff.

“Look here, Helen,” he said, rather hoarsely, “I am inde‐
page: 239 scribably shocked at what you have just told me.
I supposed it was all so different with you. I’d no suspicion of this.
And‐and—if I may say so, you’ve taught me a lesson which has gone
home—steady there—steady, good lass”—for the horses danced and snorted.—“I
don’t think I shall ever grumble much in future about troubles of my own,
having seen how splendidly you bear yours. Only I can’t agree with you no
remedy is possible for generous mistakes. The world isn’t quite so badly
made as all that. There is a remedy for every mistake except—a few physical
ones, which we euphuistically describe as visitations of God.—Steady, steady
there—wait a bit.—And I—I tell you I can’t sit down under this unhappiness
of yours and just put up with it. Don’t think me a meddling fool, please.
Something’s got to be done. I know I probably appear to you the last person
in the world to be of use. And yet I’m not sure about that. I have time—too
much of it—and I’m not quite an ass. And you—you must know, I think, there’s
nothing in heaven or earth I would not do for you that I could”—

The miller hauled his slow‐moving team aside, with beery‐thick objurgations
and apologies. The groom swung himself up at the back of the carriage again.
The impatient horses, getting their heads, swung away down Sandyfield
Street—scattering a litter of merry, little, black pigs and many remonstrant
fowls to right and left—past modest village shop, and yellow‐washed tavern,
and red, lichen‐stained cottage, beneath the row of tall Lombardy poplars
that raised their brown‐grey spires to the blue‐grey of the autumn sky.
Richard’s left hand held the reins again.

“Half confidences are no good,” he said. “So, as you’ve trusted me thus far,
Helen, don’t you think you will trust somewhat further? Be explicit. Tell me
the rest.”

And hearing him, seeing him, just then, Madame de Vallorbes’ heart melted
within her, and, to her own prodigious surprise, she had much ado not to
weep.